Identical
by The Cell
Summary: Tina knows he's hiding something.
1. Chapter 1

Does not belong to me, but I like playing with it anyway.

* * *

Tina likes Blaine. Of course she does, everyone does. They don't have a problem with each other. It's just that she's always felt like he was half lying to them. She's never known what it is exactly, and Mike always just chuckled and told her she was being paranoid, Kurt could take care of himself. But it isn't about protecting Kurt anymore, he's not there. Blaine is.

The feeling is worse than ever, even though Blaine is just as nice as he alway has been. She can't shake the thought that he is hiding something, something huge. She really hopes she is being paranoid, or at least that whatever Blaine is hiding isn't going to turn out to be sociopathic tendencies because she is pretty sure he has noticed her suspicious (obsessive) staring and she would totally be the first to go if he ever did go on a killing spree.

Whenever Mike had commented on her interest in Blaine she had been able to shrug it off and usually move on to something else. Now though, when she doesn't have a boyfriend and endless drama to grab her attention away she finds herself spending more and more time trying to find...something. There is just something so wrong about him.

He doesn't seem like the kind of person to be hiding things. His heart has made a permanent home on his unseasonably short sleeves and from what she understands he had barely had time to stop for a change of clothes on his way to the airport in his rush to confess his sins to Kurt. He is so open about everything and there is still a huge piece of him that is just absent.

No one else seems to agree with this assessment and she's long stopped voicing her theories. She doesn't stop looking though, can't stop. She knows it's getting out of hand, has known this since she noticed that Blaine's left hand tenses and flexes every time someone speaks to him. She considers that he might be reaching for Kurt, just a reflex that he's training away, now that he has no use for it anymore.

She accepts that she is becoming more obsessed than is healthy when she goes back over old rehearsal clips and notices the tense and flex that was there last year as well.

Blaine is curling in on himself even more and Tina wonders when he is going to forgive himself for cheating. It was awful, but it was like it was the only thing he'd ever done wrong, like he wasn't capable of digesting this failure. She brushes a hand across his shoulders and wonders if anyone else at McKinley has realised how much he feeds off touch. She wonders if Kurt knows.

There is something beautiful in the way she can watch his shoulder muscles contract and then relax, the slow tremor leading down into his arms as he falls into her touch. People don't hug Blaine enough.

* * *

Tina stops herself from following Blaine home one day when he looks just too sad for words because no matter how much she may admit to herself that he's becoming an obsession, she's not ready for it to escalate to actual stalking just yet. She sees him at her uncle's restaurant later, picking up an order that's clearly too big for one, and he's all smiles, right down to where his probably Italian leather shoes are tapping merrily at the old linoleum flooring. He grins and waves at her when he sees her staring from her table and Tina feels a little offended, but can't quite place why.

As the annoying bell signals his exit she realises that either the smile or the frowns were a lie and she's not sure which she would prefer. She wants to hope that the smile is real, and it looks so real it's still burned into her retinas fifteen minutes later, but she hates the implications of that. If the smile is real, then he's been lying to her for so long and she doesn't know why. Everyone had been telling him to cheer up for weeks so he had no reason to feign unhappiness. If he was clinging to unhappiness in the hopes of garnering sympathy then...well he had succeeded.

If Blaine had been faking his anguish and Tina had just fallen for it then the Blaine she'd been studying so closely didn't exist. The Blaine who was perfect in almost every way was gone. More than that he had smiled at her now. His smile hadn't even wavered. If he was hiding from everyone and he couldn't even be bothered to force a trembling lip when he saw her then she must not even register with him. She must really be so insignificant that she wasn't worth lying to.

She hoped he was unhappy. She felt horrible for wishing that on anyone, especially on him, but she did truly hope that the smile was his mask. The Blaine she knew, her Blaine, he would paste on a smile to go out in public, use it as armor against the crowds. He hadn't managed a smile that genuine since before the break up, but he was away from school, away from any memory of Kurt so maybe...

The next day she sees Blaine, shoulders hunched, huddled over a book before class. Her mind tries to reconcile him with the smiling boy from the restaurant and she realises they look nothing alike. They do obviously, she tells herself sternly, they're the same person. At the same time though, Smiling-Blaine had been wearing glasses, his hair had been...well not ungelled, but less gelled at least. She tries to stop staring but finds herself playing spot the difference.  
She feels insane again when she realises that the glasses are the only really un-Blaine thing about Smiling-Blaine, and for all she knows Blaine wears contacts to school. The hair had been less glued to his head, but it had been close to ten PM. The clothes were different from his usual school outfits, but not enough that she couldn't see him wearing them to a party or a date. Her mind hissed at the second alternative. There had been a blazer that managed to be both colorful and stylish (impressive considering it was plaid), well-tailored slacks and very classy shoes, sans socks. It is the most Blaine outfit she's seen on anyone other than Blaine but her mind refuses to accept it as Blaine.

* * *

She follows Blaine home one day. She second guesses herself a million times, but she still pulls out of the McKinley parking lot behind him. Blaine lives farther from McKinley than anyone, he's not even in the right district. Tina knows she would have pulled over halfway there and demanded to know why someone was following her, but Blaine isn't paranoid. He pulls up to a house that is much bigger than she's imagined, even with Kurt and Rachel's descriptions.

She sits in the driveway for almost a minute before she pulls herself out of her car and walks up to the imposing house. The door has massive brass knockers but she settles for pushing the doorbell and waits. Smiling-Blaine opens it. He's not wearing a blazer today. He's also not wearing what Blaine was wearing a minute ago.

He looks confused and Tina allows her mind to leap to the conclusion that this is some other boy before regaining it back in and allowing for the possibility that he is just shocked that someone has followed him home. "Oh, hey, did we have plans?" His smile is warm and welcoming, and he's already stepped aside to allow her entrance, reaching for her jacket mutely.

She looks at him, trying to figure out what she's been missing all these months. "You're not Blaine." The words are out of her mouth before she can stop them and she bites her tongue to keep herself from elaborating on her insane theory.

"No. He's not." The response is from the stairs. Blaine, her Blaine, has shed his cardigan and his bowtie is untied. Smiling-Blaine isn't smiling anymore. He's frowning, but he doesn't look sad. He looks wary and he's looking at Blaine as though he isn't sure what to do and Blaine has all the answers. "This is Adam."

Blaine has a brother. Actually, Blaine has two brothers. Blaine has a twin. They're so identical that even standing next to each other she can't see anything about them that's not exactly the same. She looks for all the things people always say about twins. One is a little taller, one has freckles, one has different eyes (and wouldn't that be a tragedy). There is nothing. They look exactly alike and yet...Adam looks nothing like Blaine.

"You have a twin." Adam shifts closer to Blaine and they fold into each other. Blaine looks at her but doesn't respond. "That's what you're always hiding."

Blaine frowns, just for a second. "Adam is what you're always looking for." Adam tucks his head into Blaine's neck.

It's proof that he's been hiding from them. It's even proof that he knew she was looking but never finding.

"Why are you hiding a twin? Why would you hide him?" There was no reason she could think of why anyone would lie about something like that, why Blaine, who valued honesty so highly, would keep something like this from her.

There is no answer but Blaine reaches out for her and she steps forward and allows him to draw her in. His right hand traces across her cheek and settles on her neck, his left is still resting around his brother. Another hand comes out to sweep down her arm and take her hand. "Please don't tell them." She doesn't understand at all. Blaine let her see. He could have easily stayed upstairs, let Adam get rid of her and she would have convinced herself it was always Blaine. Why would he have let her see if no one could know? Her mind drifts back to the restaurant and the voice in the back of her mind telling her there can only be one reason he's not hiding from her is coming back.

She can't look Blaine in the eyes so she looks at Adam instead. He has the same hazel eyes with the same pleading expression, but they're not her eyes. She tried to ignore the repetitive chant of 'not even enough to hide from, not even a blip on his radar'. There is still one hand resting on the junction between her neck and shoulder, and one cradling her hand and she feels herself move into the touch. She allows herself to imagine that he let her see because she matters more than all the others (more than Kurt her mind supplies), but the voice doesn't go away.

"Why?" It doesn't sound as broken coming out as she expects it to and she thinks for a second that they will let it pass, let it be about why they don't want anyone to know. The hands start pulling and she finds herself all wrapped up in warm and solid and she wants to pull away, to say she doesn't even know him, but she wraps an arm around a neck and the other around a waist and she's much too comfortable to move.

Adam offers her a drink but doesn't release his hold on either of them. Tina declines and steps away, promising she won't say anything and she's in her car before her brain begins to function normally again.


	2. Chapter 2

Still not mine.

* * *

She doesn't tell anyone, and Blaine doesn't mention anything when they meet at school on Monday and he hands her the jacket Adam had taken off for her. He also doesn't comment when she gets in his car at the end of the school day and she watches silently as he passes by the turn that would have taken him to her house.

Adam greets them both at the door, hands full of garlands and wraps a long strand of tinsel around Tina like a boa. He's grinning wide enough that Tina can count all of his teeth and he's practically skipping as he pulls them both through the hall and into a huge room where boxes are stacked on every available surface. Blaine smiles.

Tina forgets that she's supposed to be confronting Blaine about his hiding Adam in favor of allowing the latter to drag her over to an opened box that's so full of sparkly things she wouldn't be surprised to see a unicorn leap out of it. There is a beautiful grand piano sitting by the huge bay windows and Blaine settles on the bench and lets his fingers glide across the keys. She almost tells him they've had enough Christmas songs after glee rehearsal for their Christmas show. She doesn't. Blaine actually looks happy as he hums the opening bars of _Have yourself a merry little Christmas_, even though the arrangement is melancholy, and he smiles as he watches Adam dance around the room.

She finds herself staring again and digs her hands into the nearest box, finding several ornate cut tin candle holders. Adam is still moving around the room just this side of too fast and Tina's eyes follow him around the room as she carefully takes one perfectly straight white candle after the other from their pristine cardboard box and puts them the holders. He dances across the antique carpets and she notices how he returns to the open box for more tinsel every so often and always makes a point to brush across Blaine, even though the piano is actually very well placed and out of his path. He leans down and sings a line loudly in Blaine's ear or he presses a kiss to his cheek or temple or he just sweeps a hand across his back. Blaine just keeps playing, one song bleeding into the next.

There is tinsel everywhere, even on the frame of the portrait of the elegant woman with the man with the strong jaw and the brown haired boy with the million dollar grin above the fireplace, but somehow it doesn't look like a fairy attack gone horribly wrong now that it's done. All the decorations are beautiful and they work too well together for Adam's chaotic movements to be anything but deliberate.

Tina wonders why they are decorating but doesn't ask. Her mother put up their decorations at Thanksgiving and people who liked Christmas as much as Adam clearly did (and from what she remembered happy-Blaine was much the same) did not wait until the week before Christmas break for no reason. Adam dances around her, grabbing her by the hands and pulling her into the space next to the piano he has just cleared. Blaine grins up at them and dives into an upbeat tune to match their almost-but-not-quite-a-jitterbug.

When her mother calls and asks where she is the room looks like home and smells like cinnamon and chocolate and she doesn't want to leave. Blaine grabs his keys and Adam wraps a thick woolen scarf around her neck. She's already in bed when she realises Blaine's parents never came home and he wasn't surprised. She wonders why they chose a day when their parents were gone to start their Christmas celebrations. It's the first time she's thought about Blaine's parents, and that seems so strange to her. She spends so much of her time thinking about the smallest details of his movement and what they might mean but she hasn't really considered his family at all. She's even met Cooper before but her mind has never really connected them. She knows Blaine has parents, and she knows Cooper is his brother, but her Blaine is something entirely separate from them. He's not separate from Adam though.

* * *

Tina is jealous. She is willing to admit it to herself, after all the other things she has accepted about herself it seems a stupid thing to deny. She tries not to be because all her reasons for being jealous are wrong. She's jealous of Adam. She's jealous for things she should be happy about. Adam can make Blaine smile. She's also jealous about things that she thinks she might only be imagining. She's jealous of how Adam can touch Blaine. She knows that Adam touching Blaine, while it looks intimate, is not at all how she wants to touch Blaine, even when they're the same touches they're so different.

She doesn't tell Blaine, because she doesn't know how to explain why she's jealous, but she does tell Adam, because she knows she won't have to. It's the first time she's been alone with Adam and when she says it he just smiles at her and keeps moving around the kitchen, plucking spices from cupboards and pots in the window. When he eventually sticks everything in the oven he sits down opposite her at the shiny marble island.

He tells her about Blaine coming out. He says it was the summer before eighth grade and he did it for Adam. He says Blaine wasn't sure if he was gay, but that Adam was madly in love with Jake Lewitz who was starting ninth grade that year and was terrified of telling their parents. Blaine told them first so that Adam could see that everything would be alright. Adam was allowed to spend the following summer with Cooper in LA and Blaine spent it restoring a car with his father. Because obviously only straight boys build cars.

Tina asks if Adam ever came out and he tells her that by the time he came back from California his brothers had managed to convince him that everything would be fine. She almost doesn't want to ask if it was because she thinks she knows the answer.

Their father was not happy. Adam was sent to Western Reserve, a boarding school a few hours away.

She asks if they sent Blaine to Dalton to separate them and Adam answers with a short no. She knows the part of the story she isn't going to like, not that there was a happy part to this story, is coming up when Adam fidgets and gets up to check on the oven and grabbing plates and silverware. He's still angry.

Blaine went to Westerville High, and Adam thinks it was a punishment. Their father believed Blaine had turned Adam gay. When they went off to high school they both had separate rooms for the first time, even though Adam was only home every other weekend and their parents started buying two of everything the brothers had previously shared. Adam says it was probably the first time their parents started to think of them as individuals.

Blaine didn't end up at Dalton until the lacrosse team put him in the hospital.

She asks him what it's like now. She wants him to say they had an epiphany, seeing their son injured, and worked hard to make up for their atrocious behavior, but she knows he won't. He does say that they seem to have accepted that it's not something they can change.

She asks what happened with Jake Lewitz.

Jake goes to Westerville High. He took the lacrosse team to state championships last year. Tina hears exactly what Adam doesn't say.

"He was...I'm sorry."

"I'm not the one he beat up."

"No, but for Blaine it was being beaten up for his sexuality, for you it was personal."

"That's what he said. He apologized to me while he was in the hospital, over and over because his short term memory was fucked up and he was on pain meds so he just kept waking up and remembering what happened."

She doesn't know why Adam shares the story. Blaine comes back before the oven timer goes off.

When Blaine pulls out of his driveway on Wednesday night, Tina notices the unfamiliar Mercedes parked next to Blaine's Prius. She knows it's not Adam's car, and it wasn't there when they arrived. Blaine's parents, or maybe just one of them, have come home while they were there and not so much as acknowledged their sons or apparently noticed their guest.

She's always been vaguely aware that his parents never come to see him perform and that Blaine never seems to feel the need to call his parents when things run late like the rest of them and she almost wishes she didn't know why.

* * *

Tina's mother demands she comes home after school on Thursday, and wants to meet Blaine. When Tina tries to stop Blaine on his way to calculus she realises Blaine isn't Blaine and wonders how many times Adam has come to McKinley before. She smiles at him and pretends she hasn't noticed as she demands his presence at her house.

Adam smiles and agrees and Tina's mother loves him as soon as she sees him open the car door for her and her father likes him once he finds out he has a perfect GPA, supports the Buckeyes, and is highly unlikely to impregnate his daughter (always his objection to Mike).

By the end of dinner he has charmed them sufficiently that they barely bat an eyelash when Tina asks to go to his house to study for their history final the next day. Adam assures them he'll drive her to school with plenty of time to spare.

Blaine is flat on his back staring up through the glass roof of the conservatory. "This place is nice, I didn't know you were into gardening, I mean I know you joined gardening club but I thought that was kind of a missing Kurt thing."

He doesn't turn to look at her, but she can feel his full attention shift to her all the same. "It was, and a missing Adam thing." He tells her how he isn't good with plants, that the winter garden is all Adam. Blaine left gardening club after failing to keep a cactus alive. "I love this place. It's always summer and he's always here. It's comforting."

Tina settles next to him and takes his hand and Blaine laces their fingers together. "You didn't come to school today."

He smiles lightly. "Sure I did. If I didn't my perfect attendance for this year would be ruined and it would be highly inappropriate for the Student Body President to skip school."

"Have I met Adam before? Without knowing it was him?" The thought scares her more than it should.

"No. I've gone to Western Reserve a few times, but it's pretty rare that our problems coincide with only one of our schools being on break. Did he get lost today? I got lost the first time I went to Western."

"I needed to talk to you before first period." It both is and isn't an answer. She didn't even realise why she went to talk to Mr Leichs before school, despite being in his second period class. Blaine had him for first.

"Do you still?"

She wants to tell him she always needs to talk to him but she doesn't. "I took Adam to meet my parents."

"Did it go well?"

She almosts snorts. Blaine and Adam might be just odd enough to rub some teenegars the wrong way, but parents? There isn't a parent alive that doesn't wish for all kids to be like Blaine. "Of course it did, you're both like every parent's wet dream. All dapper and polite and sweet, and on top of all that gay, so there's no danger of me ending up pregnant in highschool if I spend all my time with you. I think they love you more than me now."

* * *

So... I know it's been too long, for which I can only appologise, but I have been out of the country. that is my excuse for this story, for all the other ones, I'm sorry, they got lost on their way out of my head.


	3. Chapter 3

Not mine. Also when I started this I didn't know about Tina's crush or the actual character Adam so...

* * *

Blaine doesn't cook alone. When Adam tells her he's not allowed in the kitchen alone she assumes he, like so many other teenage males, sets water on fire if left unattended. She should have known better. Blaine follows instructions well, and they have detailed recipes for everything. It's the systematic nature of the task that seems to disorient him. He doesn't have the passion Adam has for cooking, the one Tina shares to a lesser extent, and he's never been any good at going through the motions. She discovers what Adam means exactly one day when Adam and Tina are both reading through essays for their scholarship applications and Blaine is cooking.

He flutters around the kitchen restlessly, following each and every step on the recipe card exactly, and all of the little minutes in between, where Tina would find herself stirring and tasting and just breathing in the calm, she sees and hears him tapping out beats with his knuckles or dancing over to glance over their shoulders or letting his fingers slide over the keys of an imaginary piano on the nearest available surface. Adam doesn't even look up as he sighs out "Blaine, food." with a fond smile, every time the tapping starts up again and Blaine starts and goes back to his recipe card to check on the time.

Adam loves to cook and, more importantly, to bake, and so shoves Blaine out of the kitchen, propping the massive oak doors to the living room open so they can still see each other, and Blaine plops himself down on the couch or the piano bench and retreats into his own little musical world. He's playing a piece Tina doesn't recognize, but she knows it isn't his, if only because he's played it all the way through three times without changing it at all, when Adam speaks up, still kneading the dough in front of him.

"Did you know Blaine's greatest fear is being alone?" It's all kinds of unexpected and Tina is momentarily at a loss. Usually Adam is as happy as she is to just let the music wash over them, singing along occasionally, but never speaking and certainly not abruptly dropping into what feels like the middle of a fairly heavy conversation. It's jarring and she's not sure what to address first.

She settles on the first thing that comes to mind. "Are you sure you should share your brother's greatest fears?" Blaine may be very open with most of his feelings, wearing his heart on his sleeve no matter what condition it's in, but he's not one to show fear.

"It's relevant." He sounds so casually assured that Tina can't help but go with the conversation. There is no hint of nervousness that Blaine might find out and be angry at all, just flat statements of fact.

"Relevant to what?"

He looks up at her, grinning sweetly. "Your crush." Tina frowns.

"Does he know?"

"No." He looks back down at his dough, poking at it lightly before dropping it into a large metal bowl, covering it with a towel. "He's really not good with subtext and I figured you should be the one to tell him. I think you should though, you might be surprised."

"Blaine is gay. I've seen it happen before you know. There's no point in telling him. It can only make things awkward. I'll get over it eventually." She looks out into the living room and considers going home again. Christmas break is the longest time she could potentially spend away from all the things that just make her fall faster, but she can't force herself to let go. Not yet.

Adam frowns at her. "Blaine's greatest fear is being alone." He repeats, obviously willing her to understand something.

"So you said. Are you really suggesting I should emotionally manipulate your brother into a relationship he can't be happy in?" She'd be lying if she said she hadn't thought about it, but she hated herself for it.

"No. I'm suggesting maybe other people have already manipulated him. Not intentionally, I don't think, but it happens. Blaine is really bad with subtext. Sometimes what he hears isn't what you meant to say. Blaine came out for me, I already told you that, but after the way dad reacted, there was no way he could take it back, or change his mind. If he ever brought a girlfriend home it would be some kind of confirmation to dad that doing straight things with him had made him straight, and that would leave me to deal with dad."

"And Blaine would lose you." She can't stop the tiny flicker of hope that springs up at that and she stomps at it angrily, cursing Adam for putting it there.

He continues, smiling slightly now that she's following, but his eyes look sad when he looks over at Blaine. "In sophomore year he called me one night and said he'd met a girl who was spectacular, and he'd kissed her and they were going on a date. We talked about how we were going to deal with dad because it stopped being an abstract problem then. I wasn't going to let him lose out on a chance at love just to keep some of the heat off me at home. He's gotten to know her since and it probably wasn't a chance at love but we didn't know that then."

Tina remembers how Rachel had gushed about their first date. She also remembers the look on Rachel's face as she noticed Finn silently fuming from across the choir room. "They were kind of perfect for each other at first glance, but no, I don't think anyone could have really gotten between Finn and Rachel then. Now I don't know anymore." It still smarts a little to think that Rachel was worth questioning his sexuality for, but he's never looked at Tina twice. It makes sense though. Rachel is a star, no one has ever denied it, no matter how much they disagree with her personality. She wonders if Blaine might still feel that way about her, even if just a little. They'd both be in New York next year, and maybe still both be single.

"The next time I talked to him he drove all the way to my school and he was in tears. He'd spent two years telling me that we should be allowed to be honest about who we are, and the people that really mattered would accept us, and then it was as if a switch just flipped in his head. He came out as bi, or as questioning at least, to one person who wasn't me, and Kurt said that bisexuality was something gay boys hid behind in high school to feel normal for a change, or something to that effect." His hands twitch and Tina can tell he's regretting having stored the dough away now. "What Blaine heard was 'if you're bisexual not even sweet, innocent, understanding Kurt, your new best friend will accept you.' Then a few months later he followed it up with 'I'm not sure our budding romance could take it', and that's exactly what Blaine heard, except it didn't sound like a joke to him." And Blaine transferred away from his safe place and all his friends to make Kurt's senior year magical.

"You really don't like Kurt do you?" Tina never really took a side on the break up, because both of the boys were her friends. Blaine had done wrong by Kurt, but she had watched him deflate, floating around the school like a ghost with his phone permanently attached to his hand for weeks before the cheating incident so she was prepared to say that Kurt had done wrong too.

"I really don't know Kurt. I love him for making my brother happy for as long as he did, but I don't have to like what he did. I genuinely believe he loved my brother, but he used his worst fear against him more than once, and then made him live it. Blaine made one of those mistakes in that relationship that means he can never be mad about anything Kurt has done again, but I can."

"You know Blaine said he transferred to McKinley to face his fears, not just for Kurt."

"I'm sure he did. I love Blaine more than life itself, but that is a downright lie. Blaine was never afraid of bullies, not really. He's been a bit nervous around them, for good reason, but never enough for it to stop him from confronting them. Blaine can't run from his fears because his fear is being abandoned, what he can do is hang on as tight as he can, sometimes that's too tight, but make no mistake, facing his fear would have been staying at Dalton and testing their relationship." The timer on the oven beeps and he pulls out a tray of cookies Tina doesn't know who he expects to eat and the conversation is dropped as Blaine comes wandering in, guided by his nose and smiling at them both.

"You know we should drop off another load of food at the shelter at some point tomorrow, the cupboards are filling up." Blaine mumbles, covering his mouth to disguise what's left of the bite of cookie.

* * *

It's early morning on Christmas Eve when Tina's mother calls her to say the cousins have arrived and she should come home and spend some time with her own family. She hasn't been up before either of her hosts before and she finds herself a little at a loss when she hangs up with a promise to be home within the hour. Heading for the kitchen to switch on the coffee maker had seemed like the natural thing to do but she freezes just as her bare feet are about to touch the marble floor of the dining room (still the only room with decorations) when she hears a distinctly female voice.

Her first thought is that they are being burgled and she should call the police and wake the boys. Her second thought is to smack herself because the woman is obviously their mother and she smooths her hair and enters the kitchen, feeling immensely grateful that she slipped into her dress before coming downstairs rather than wandering down in her PJs as she had done upon waking to an empty room the previous day. She pastes on a polite smile and puts her best foot forward as she introduces herself as Blaine's friend because people don't raise boys like Adam and Blaine without caring about manners.

Mrs Anderson smiles distractedly at her and instructs her to make herself at home before excusing herself, pulling a very chic scarf (Kurt would approve, she's sure) around her neck and heading for the door. Mr Anderson nods at her curtly from his seat at the table and offers her an equally distant greeting before setting his mug in the dishwasher and making his own way out. He stops just short of the door and asks her to remind the boys to remove the decorations in the dining room before the fifth so as to not interfere with the catering crew setting up.  
Her answer has barely left her lips before he too is gone and she shakes her head, pulling out a new coffee filter as she contemplates his last words, ignoring the nagging feeling that they were both a product of her uncaffeinated morning brain.

Blaine stumbles into the room before she has time to question herself or the message further and she relays it to him as he kisses her cheek and reaches over her to pull out three mugs. He tells her their parents hold a party on the sixth of January in honor of the Rotary club and that has always been the rule. She quirks an eyebrow at him in lieu of asking why they needed to be reminded before Christmas even started and pretends not to flinch when she realizes the Andersons have both left their seventeen year old sons alone over Christmas and New Years without even waiting for them to wake up to say goodbye.

"We try not to take it personally, they don't like most people, including each other."

Tina doesn't tear up. She does call her mother back and can barely follow the conversation after she utters the words alone and Christmas in the same sentence because suddenly everything is just a mess of ranting with varying volume as her mother and aunt pass the phone back and forth and demand she summon both boys to her mother's living room post haste. She tells them they'll be over when they boys have gotten dressed and her mother grudgingly agrees not to drive over and collect them immediately.

Adam and Blaine give her identical smiles as she turns to find them seated at the island, coffee in hand, and Blaine reaches over to hand her her own mug. She informs them of their new plans for the day and watches them struggle to figure out whether it would be more rude to impose or to argue with her. She reminds them that arguing won't stop them from being dragged to her house so if anything the result would be both arguing and imposing. Blaine heads for the wine cellar and Adam starts pulling out an assortment of the Christmas goods he's been baking and arranging them on a large platter.

* * *

Sorry about the delay, but I can't promise to get better.


End file.
